Chimpanzees Have Accents

Chimpanzees have regional accents. Send this to whoever insists that animals only make noise. Scientists have just reported that young chimpanzees living in different parts of Africa do not sound the same, and that the distance between them widens as the animals grow up.

Čimpanze imaju regionalne naglaske. Pošalji ovo svakome tko tvrdi da životinje samo ispuštaju zvukove. Znanstvenici su upravo objavili da mlade čimpanze koje žive u različitim dijelovima Afrike ne zvuče isto, i da se razlika među njima povećava kako životinje odrastaju.

The team went through more than eleven thousand recorded calls from infants and juveniles in two separate places, one a rescue centre in Zambia, the other a national park in Tanzania. They sorted the sounds into grunts, whimpers and laughter, and then measured them. The youngest animals sounded broadly similar wherever they lived. The older ones did not. Each group had drifted towards its own particular way of grunting.

Tim je prošao kroz više od jedanaest tisuća snimljenih poziva mladunčadi i mladih čimpanzi na dva odvojena mjesta, jednom centru za spašavanje u Zambiji, i jednom nacionalnom parku u Tanzaniji. Razvrstali su zvukove na gunđanje, cviljenje i smijeh, a zatim ih izmjerili. Najmlađe životinje zvučale su uglavnom slično gdje god živjele. Starije nisu. Svaka je skupina otklizala prema vlastitom, posebnom načinu gunđanja.

That drift is the interesting part, because chimpanzee calls were long assumed to be fixed at birth, written into the animal rather than picked up from the neighbours. If a young chimp is instead absorbing the sound of the group around it, the way a child soaks up the vowels of a street, then accent may be a much older habit than anybody was willing to claim.

To pomicanje je zanimljiv dio, jer se dugo pretpostavljalo da su pozivi čimpanzi fiksni od rođenja, upisani u životinju umjesto pokupljeni od susjeda. Ako mladi čimpanza umjesto toga upija zvuk skupine oko sebe, onako kako dijete upija samoglasnike svoje ulice, onda bi naglasak mogao biti mnogo starija navika nego što je itko bio spreman priznati.